Data communication networks serve User Equipment (UE) with data communication services like internet access, voice calling, social networking, and the like. To extend the range and mobility of these data communication services, the data communication networks deploy wireless access networks. The wireless access networks have wireless base stations that communicate wirelessly with the UEs. The wireless base stations are also coupled to the data communication networks. Wireless relays are used to further extend the range of the wireless base stations. Thus, wireless relays exchange user data between the UEs and the wireless base stations.
Hardware trust entails the physical validation of the computer hardware that executes computer software. The computer hardware has a physically-embedded, read-only, secret key. A remote hardware trust server challenges the computer software with a random number to prove hardware trust. The computer software reads and hashes the secret code with the random number to generate a hardware trust result that it sends to the hardware trust server. The hardware trust server hashes the same random number with its own copy of the secret key to validate hardware trust from the computer software.
Unfortunately, the integration of hardware trust in the wireless relays is not efficient and effective. In particular, wireless relays that offer both hardware-trusted and normal wireless communication services have not been optimized.